Brian Wojtalewicz with this weeks Lets Have At It.

4-19-11



Pay, Shut-Up and Take It



Did you enjoy paying your taxes? You’ll be comforted to know that by conservative estimates the Wall Street mega-banks and hedge funds are using tax loopholes to evade over $100 Billion in taxes via off-shore accounts. This is just one part of the tax avoidance and evasion schemes that too many large corporations enjoy.



The right-wing’s leading financier and cheerleader, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, the Fox Network and the Wall Street Journal, recently enjoyed a tax rate of 6%. Investigations have revealed that he has at least 152 off-shore accounts in his empire. The result? Ordinary citizens like you have been paying more taxes to keep basic government services solvent.



Democratic senators in Washington, D.C., led by Levin and Obama (when he was a senator) introduced a new law to try to close these off-shore tax loopholes for the mega-corps. They have gotten nowhere so far.



Instead, Republican Congressmen Boehner, and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, cheered on by Fox News mouthpieces Limbaugh, Hannity and O’Reilly, believe the solution is to cut even more funding for our nursing homes, hospitals and medical coverage for the working poor. Their latest effort is to cut Medicare by handing our Medicare dollars to the private insurance industry, on the theory that they’ll run it so much more efficiently! The last I checked, the Medicare system’s overhead is about 4%, while the private health insurance industry’s is over 30%. Sound like a good move to you?



It is certainly a move that a guy named Steve Hemsley, the CEO of United Health has been lobbying for. United Health is the largest private health insurer in the nation, and Hemsley’s income for 2010 was a measly $48.8 Million. This news recently came with a private industry spokesman advising us chumps that Hemsley was actually underpaid compared to other execs in his industry! But hold on, Bubba, don’t get into “class warfare” and start demanding a tax rate on these greedmongers that would be equal to the tax rate their ilk paid back when Eisenhower, Johnson, Kennedy and Nixon were president. Just be a good little propagandized boy and girl -- shut up and take it.